The Dallas City Council plans to vote Wednesday on a reformed housing policy aimed at addressing long-standing racial inequities across a city that historically discriminated against its Black and Hispanic residents.
The new policy is set to create ways to measure progress and create actual plans on how to decrease disparities in city housing — shortcomings an audit found in the city’s previous policy approved in 2018.
Under the plan, city staff would be charged with identifying disparities in housing opportunities and reducing them, as well as increasing housing production and preservation to improve affordability for mixed-income communities in all areas of the city.
The policy will require the city to prioritize infrastructure investment in targeted areas; focus on boosting the impact of partnerships; and engage with all its residents when making housing investment decisions.
Council member Casey Thomas, representing parts of southern Dallas’ Mountain Creek area, called for the audit that exposed problems with the current policy and chairs the council’s housing and homelessness committee.
He said he believes the new housing policy will be more effective at addressing past harm because it requires the city to look through the lens of equity when making decisions. Thomas championed the city’s adoption of a racial equity plan last year aimed at addressing disparities across Dallas.
“This policy would lay the foundation for eradicating decades of institutional discriminatory policies and will create a new opportunity for generational wealth for communities of color through homeownership,” Thomas said.
Equity-focused changes
The city began revamping the 2018 housing policy after the independent audit released in December 2021 found the policy lacked strategies to address past racist practices that continue to hamper Hispanic and Black residents seeking homes throughout Dallas.
Along with helping create and maintain affordable housing, the 2018 policy was supposed to address lingering impacts of city policies that legalized segregation and concentrated poverty in southern Dallas. Programs the city provided to help people get homes were under-resourced and too difficult for the public to access, according to the audit by TDA Consulting.
When the city went back to the drawing board, the council approved 11 recommendations in April 2022 to guide the process. The recommendations focused on establishing specific and measurable goals.
The recommendations call for creating a money source dedicated to closing Dallas’ affordable housing shortage, making sure apartment projects subsidized by federal tax credits are placed throughout the city, and establishing timelines and specific goals for the policy to achieve.
Recommendations also include adding a goal centered on fixing southern Dallas’ roads and other infrastructure to foster housing, a public campaign to educate people on the meaning of racial equity in the context of affordable housing and community development, and creating a citywide plan to combat neighborhood opposition that derails affordable housing developments.
Another recommendation called for the city to use low-income housing tax credits for private housing in both high opportunity areas with low poverty rates and distressed areas with higher poverty rates.
HUD investigation
While Dallas tries to turn a corner on historical discrimination, the city and its housing finance corporation have been under scrutiny from federal officials, according to documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is investigating allegations that the city’s placement of low-income housing in areas with large populations of non-white residents is furthering segregation in violation of the Civil Rights Act, Fair Housing Act and Housing Community Development Act of 1974, according to an attorney representing a Dallas man who filed a complaint.
The probe stems from a complaint filed in 2021 with HUD by Darryl Baker, a Black homeowner in Dallas. Baker says the city’s practice of building high numbers of low-income apartment complexes in non-white neighborhoods creates pockets of poverty that disparately harm residents of color.
Baker says the working poor of Dallas often have to work several jobs to make ends meet but rarely live in the communities where they’re employed because those areas lack affordable housing.
“These aren’t lazy people,” Baker said. “They work two or three jobs to make ends meet. They deserve to live in a place they can afford that’s decent and safe, near grocery stores and good schools and their jobs.”
According to the complaint, the city approved 31 low-income tax credit projects, mostly apartment buildings, between 2018 and mid-2021. Of those, 29 were in predominantly Hispanic and Black neighborhoods in southern Dallas.
Longtime fair housing attorneys Mike Daniel and Laura Beshara are representing Baker in the HUD complaint.
Dallas’ north-south divide
Dallas has struggled to address the north-south divide since the city passed a referendum allowing racial housing segregation in 1916. The ramifications are still visible.
Dallas is made up of 1.3 million people who live within 14 City Council districts. Hispanic and Black residents make up the majority of residents living in districts south of Interstate 30, which is commonly viewed as the dividing line between the northern and southern areas of the city. White residents make up the majority of all but one district in northern Dallas.
The lone exception is a majority Hispanic region of West Dallas, where residents are trying to battle the impacts of industrial development near residential neighborhoods.
Of the 217,000 houses owned by Dallas residents, nearly half are owned by white homeowners, although they make up only 28% of the population, according to 2020 estimates from the Census Bureau. Hispanic residents, on the other hand, make up 42% of the population but own just 31% of the homes. Black homeowners are also underrepresented.
A study in 2022 by researchers at Southern Methodist University shows just how different the two halves of Dallas remain.
Researchers analyzed almost 800 Dallas neighborhoods using public data and aerial maps. They found 62 “infrastructure deserts,” low-income areas with poor streets and sidewalks as well as poor access to the internet, public transportation, medical services and other infrastructure deficiencies. Most of the infrastructure deserts were in southern Dallas neighborhoods mostly made up of Black and Hispanic residents.
Close to 20% of 127 predominantly Black neighborhoods and nearly 20% of 313 predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods had highly deficient infrastructure. In predominantly white areas, it was 5% of 235 neighborhoods.
Barbara Minsker, a civil and environmental engineering professor who led the SMU project, said the city’s underinvestment is glaring. Compared to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, Minsker said her team’s research shows Dallas has the worst infrastructure of the four and the largest gap between low-income and high-income residents.
The remedy is to be intentional about where public money goes, she said.
“When it comes to bonds and otherwise, Dallas will have to spend more money in areas that have deficits instead of spreading it evenly across the city or in places that are in good shape,” Minsker said. “There’s no other way residents in underserved areas will catch up.”
